The Transportation Safety Administration is not merely a government agency. It is also a kind of real-time library, tracking the human folly that plays out at some of the human folly-est places there are: airports. Now, the TSA has released information from a year's worth of checkpoint-monitoring ... and the information it has presented is, unsurprisingly, folly-filled. (Among the objects confiscated from passenger luggage: cane swords, bottles of gunpowder, and "more inert grenades than you would ever imagine.")

Here are some of the TSA's takeaways -- some of them literal -- from a year's worth of airport screenings and confiscations:

Passengers screened, total: 637,582,122

Passengers screened, per day: 1,746,800

Total firearms discovered in carry-on bags at checkpoints across the country: 1,543